In the 1990s, despite empirical support for linking theory to practice in professional education, a theory - practice gap persisted in medical education. This dissertation presents three initiatives and their evaluation to address the theory - practice gap in medical education at an Australian medical school. Case Based Teaching ( CBT ), a teaching and learning initiative, was designed and implemented in the Department of Physiology at the University of Adelaide. It aimed to introduce students to clinical skills in a way that built student confidence ; to achieve integration of knowledge between medical and clinical sciences ; and to strengthen the link between theory and clinical practice. Students and their tutors reported that CBT was beneficial in their development, and realised its three major aims. Greatest support came from students on the verge of their clinical training. Few studies, with both internal and external validity, have demonstrated the potential of computer aided learning ( CAL ) in medical education. In the second initiative, a self - directed CAL resource linking theory to practice was designed in three different learning formats. A randomised controlled trial showed learning gains for CAL users ( in terms of ability to retain and apply knowledge ) compared to non - users, but the active CAL format did not prove superior to more passive ones. The study demonstrated the importance of using valid assessment tools to measure learning outcomes, and the difficulties of conducting randomised controlled trials in the real world of medical education. Finally, the utility of a novel integrated practical examination was evaluated, in terms of reliability, validity, acceptability, cost and educational impact. The large investment of time and effort that was required to reform assessment practice brought rewards. Good reliability was achieved, and validity was maximised by linking theory to practice, and an extensive item review process. Assessment reform was used to drive the integration of teaching and learning. Basic science and professional knowledge consist of two different worlds, the former being analytic and general and the latter, holistic and particular. This dissertation has addressed the challenge of linking these two worlds, with initiatives that embedded these two knowledge structures within the other, fostering professional competence that is founded on procedural, propositional and personal knowledge. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Molecular and Biomedical Sciences, 2004.

Traditionally, consistency is the only criterion for the quality of a theory in logic-based approaches to reasoning about actions. This work goes beyond that and contributes to the meta-theory of actions by investigating what other properties a good domain description should satisfy. Having Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL) as background, we state some meta-theoretical postulates <br />concerning this sore spot. When all postulates are satisfied, we call the action theory modular. We point out the problems that arise when the postulates about modularity are violated, and propose algorithmic checks that can help the designer of an action theory to overcome them. Besides being easier to understand and more elaboration tolerant in McCarthy's sense, modular theories<br />have interesting computational properties. Moreover, we also propose a framework for updating domain descriptions and show the importance modularity has in action theory change.

<p>This study is an evaluation of the rehabilitative effects of the Cognitive Skills program, an accredited correctional treatment program offered by the Swedish probation service since 1995. Whereas the program has previously been studied in Swedish prison settings, this is the first Swedish study in a non-custodial setting. All 117 male probationer program participants 1995-2000 were closely matched to 349 controls in a survival analysis of long-term recidivism in the sample. Program completers did not show lower relative risk of relapse than the control group, consisting of probationers who did not enter the program. A survival analysis of a violent offender subsample was inconclusive due to sample size but suggests a potential program effect on this type of offender.</p>

<p>Uppsatsens syfte var att beskriva hur arbetsterapeuter resonerar kliniskt vid bedömning av arbetsförmåga hos personer med neuropsykiatriska funktionsnedsättningar. För denna studie användes en kvalitativ ansats. Semistrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes med fem arbetsterapeuter som jobbar mot arbetsmarknaden. Frågeområdena inspirerades av <em>clinical reasoning </em>”three track mind” där <em>procedural, interactive</em> och <em>conditional reasoning</em> utgör de tre olika tankemönstren.</p><p>Resultatet redovisades i fyra kategorier och ett övergripande tema som beskriver arbetsterapeuternas kliniska resonemang: Att forma en frågeställning, Att välja bedömningsmetod, Att utforma en slutrapport och Yrkeskompetens. Det övergripande temat, Att se till olika aspekter vid bedömning, visar den röda tråden genom kategorierna. Resultatet i vår studie visar på den komplexitet som finns i de resonemang som förs vid bedömning av arbetsförmåga. Något som kan jämföras med <em>clinical reasonings</em> "three track mind" och som framkommer i vårt tema; <em>Att se till olika aspekter vid bedömning.</em> De deltagande arbetsterapeuterna beskriver hur resonemanget i arbetsförmågebedömningarna sker utifrån en mängd olika aspekter, och arbetsterapeuterna menar att de hela tiden måste se till både delarna och helheten. Vilka svårigheter som finns och hur olika faktorer påverkar personen de bedömer, och hur alla faktorer tillsammans är avgörande för personens arbetsförmåga.</p>

Development of highly intelligent computers requires a conceptual foundation that will overcome the limitations of the von Neumann architecture. Architectures for such a foundation should meet the following design goals: * Address the fundamental organizational issues of large-scale parallelism and sharing in a fully integrated way. This means attention to organizational principles, as well as hardware and software. * Serve as an experimental apparatus for testing large-scale artificial intelligence systems. * Explore the feasibility of an architecture based on abstractions, which serve as natural computational primitives for parallel processing. Such abstractions should be logically independent of their software and hardware host implementations. In this paper we lay out some of the fundamental design issues in parallel architectures for Artificial Intelligence, delineate limitations of previous parallel architectures, and outline a new approach that we are pursuing.

Causal reconstruction is the task of reading a written causal description of a physical behavior, forming an internal model of the described activity, and demonstrating comprehension through question answering. T his task is difficult because written d escriptions often do not specify exactly how r eferenced events fit together. This article (1) ch aracterizes the causal reconstruction problem, (2) presents a representation called transition space, which portrays events in terms of "transitions,'' or collections of changes expressible in everyday language, and (3) describes a program called PATHFINDER, which uses the transition space representation to perform causal reconstruction on simplified English descriptions of physical activity.

Lifting is a well known technique in resolution theorem proving, logic programming, and term rewriting. In this paper we formulate lifting as an efficiency-motivated program transformation applicable to a wide variety of nondeterministic procedures. This formulation allows the immediate lifting of complex procedures, such as the Davis-Putnam algorithm, which are otherwise difficult to lift. We treat both classical lifting, which is based on unification, and various closely related program transformations which we also call lifting transformations. These nonclassical lifting transformations are closely related to constraint techniques in logic programming, resolution, and term rewriting.

The goal of the Programmer's Apprentice project is to develop a theory of how expert programmers analyze, synthesize, modify, explain, specify, verify, and document programs. This research goal overlaps both artificial intelligence and software engineering. From the viewpoint of artificial intelligence, we have chosen programming as a domain in which to study fundamental issues of knowledge representation and reasoning. From the viewpoint of software engineering, we seek to automate the programming process by applying techniques from artificial intelligence.

The Listener is an automated system that unintrusively performs knowledge acquisition from informal input. The Listener develops a coherent internal representation of a description from an initial set of disorganized, imprecise, incomplete, ambiguous, and possibly inconsistent statements. The Listener can produce a summary document from its internal representation to facilitate communication, review, and validation. A special purpose Listener, called the Requirements Apprentice (RA), has been implemented in the software requirements acquisition domain. Unlike most other requirements analysis tools, which start from a formal description language, the focus of the RA is on the transition between informal and formal specifications.

This paper explores automating the qualitative analysis of physical systems. It describes a program, called PLR, that takes parameterized ordinary differential equations as input and produces a qualitative description of the solutions for all initial values. PLR approximates intractable nonlinear systems with piecewise linear ones, analyzes the approximations, and draws conclusions about the original systems. It chooses approximations that are accurate enough to reproduce the essential properties of their nonlinear prototypes, yet simple enough to be analyzed completely and efficiently. It derives additional properties, such as boundedness or periodicity, by theoretical methods. I demonstrate PLR on several common nonlinear systems and on published examples from mechanical engineering.